Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify has launched a new feature to help merchants set up and design their store using artificial intelligence (AI).
The company announced the feature launch in a post on X, coinciding with another post from Shopify president Harley Finkelstein explaining how it works. In a video, Finkelstein explained that merchants can describe their businesses with prompts on their stores’ backend theme pages, and the AI store setup tool will create custom themes based on that description.
“At Shopify, we’ve already made the build process pretty seamless with our preset themes that allow merchants to easily choose the design, but we know that customizations can still take time,” Finkelstein said. “I really love this new store setup, because it makes the barrier to launch a business even lower.”
According to the Shopify Help Center, a single theme description will generate up to 3 free personalized themes. Shopify warns merchants that they are responsible for the accuracy of all the content they publish to their Shopify-powered store, even when automatic text generation is used to create it.
BetaKit reached out to Shopify for more details on the feature but did not hear back by press time.
Shopify, Canada’s largest tech company, recently took some steps that could accelerate its potential to become domiciled in the United States (US).
RELATED: Shopify’s latest SEC filings show potential to become US-domiciled, TD analyst warns
First noted by TD Securities managing director Peter Haynes last month, Shopify listed its New York City office alongside its normally-standalone Ottawa headquarters in a 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its latest fourth-quarter earnings. A 10-K form is required from domestic issuers while, up until now, Shopify had only filed the 40-F form used by foreign issuers.
A Shopify spokesperson told BetaKit the filing was voluntary “in order to align our disclosures more closely with other software peers,” but did not respond to questions from BetaKit regarding whether its SEC reporting changes are part of a plan to redomicile as a US company.
Feature image courtesy Burst.